Creative professionals often utilize a variety of images as part of media content creation. Examples of images include geometric shapes, photographs, illustrations, drawings, and textual items. Media content creation can include production of many different types of designs, including those for marketing materials, books, magazines, presentations, web pages, advertisements, application interfaces that are based on web technologies, and so forth. For each of these different types of designs, creative professionals select and carefully arrange images to create a desired appearance for the media content. The appearance of a design is intended to establish a mood, convey a particular aesthetic, engender an emotion, communicate a meaning, provide a unifying theme, generate interest, and so forth. Thus, preserving the appearance of a design is important to meeting the goals of a creative professional.
Generally, images and other individual aspects of a design may be considered objects that make up a design. Using a design application, a creative professional develops a design by selecting objects and arranging the objects on a digital canvas. Objects can be placed at any planar location along horizontal and vertical directions of the digital canvas. Creative professionals are further empowered to layer objects by placing one object at least partially over another object. In other words, different objects can be positioned in different layers, including in an overlapping manner, along a depth direction associated with the digital canvas.
When one object is positioned above another object from a depth perspective, the two objects can interact with each other visually. If two overlapping objects interact with each other, the combined appearance of the two objects changes in accordance with the type of interaction at least in the area in which the objects overlap. Thus, objects can interact with one another to produce various visual effects. Examples of object interaction effects include transparency, opacity, blending, shadow, glow, feathering, group knockout, and combinations thereof. Each of these interaction effects may offer “sub-effects” that allow for different types of the main effect. For instance, different types of blending effects include normal, multiplication, lighting, hue or saturation, difference, screen, combinations thereof, and so forth.
After a creative professional completes a design, the objects of the design appear on a display screen for the design application in a desired manner so as to achieve the goals of the creative professional. The design application can print the design so as to have the desired appearance of the objects, including the object interaction effects. However, the design cannot reach a widespread target audience in today's electronically-connected world without publishing the design digitally. A digital publication can be disseminated through many different electronic channels, such as the web (e.g., using hypertext markup language (HTML)), ebooks, and individual media content applications. Unfortunately, producing a digital publication from a design that includes layered objects having interaction effects is difficult. Existing strategies for digital publication fail to maintain the appearance of layered objects that interact with one another to create visual effects. For example, the visual effects resulting from interaction among overlapping objects can be dropped when a digital publication is produced. Object interaction can also be corrupted such that the resulting visual appearance differs from what a designer intended.
To address these problems with maintaining object interaction effects during the publication of a design, a conventional approach is to rasterize an entire design to generate a single bitmapped image for the digital publication. However, using a single image precludes the reformatting of objects to account for different screen sizes and resolutions as the digital publication is disseminated to different devices having different form factors and display capabilities—such as smart phones and desktop computers. Moreover, publishing a design using a single bitmapped image prevents the inclusion of a dynamic object, such as a graphics interchange format (GIF) item, in the digital publication. Consequently, the immense variety of object interaction effects that are available in many design applications continue to be essentially unusable in designs that are intended for distribution across diverse digital publication channels.